As an unsettling follow-up to the previous post, the credit markets are, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, blinking red. And it's worth being clear on what this means. Wall Street is Wall Street. It remains primarily a playground for the wealthy. But in this economy, credit is everything. They are consumer demand and foreclosures and employment numbers and business hires and everything else. And what you really, really don't want is for credit market to go down when you're in a recession. Credit is how families and businesses alike ride out bad times. Deprive them of that cushion, and an ordinary recession becomes something far worse.
